Well that worked well. Take 2 with the missing photos!
Hi,
I thought I would post some photos (apologies for the poor quality) and details of the Tezro video editing system that I have set up at home. It's been a multi-year project the same as uunix editing system with a lot of learning on the way just to get it to work.
As there are a few photos, I will post in two halves showing the hardware side and then the system working in a separate post.
The core of the system is a quad 700Mhz Tezro system that was sold as an editing system by Discreet. Other than beefing up the RAM to 8Gb, the only changes internally are the boot drive (which is now a Samsung SSD in an ACARD ARS-2320S SATA to SCSI converter) and the addition of an LSI SAS/SATA controller which I have an external SAS disk array (Infortrend C2131) connected to.
Externally, the original IBM disk arrays were replaced due to cascading failures of the disk drives due to age and replaced with an SGI-branded T4600 trays which were salvaged from a decommissioned Altrix system. These have 4Gb fibre interfaces but I run them as 2Gb due to not having 4Gb PCI cards for the Tezro. The photo below shows one with 5x 1Tb WD Enterprise drives which are fast enough to keep the applications happy.
The other common equipment with these systems is the ADA8824 ADAT unit for handling audio and the VBOB for video. Both of which are still required for the system to operate correctly. The Tezro and VBOB can be seen in the following photo.
Rather than sourcing an analogue or digital VTR and handling tapes, I opted to go with more current generation equipment from Blackmagic Design (BMD) which is cost effective and adheres to the required Broadcast standards this type of system requires. I use the HperDeck Studio has my VTR and a dual 8" screen to monitor the output from the HyperDeck as well as the output from the VBOB. BMD use (in the equipment I have) 3Gbps SDI which is compatible for the VBOB and I can loop-through to other devices. In the photo below, you can see the VBOB output on the left-side screen (just colour bars on power up) and the HyperDeck output on the right-side screen. This comes in handy when you need to confirm you getting both input and output to the VBOB.

Also visible in the photo (bottom right) is the SyncGen3 audio reference unit which I use as the 48Khz reference signal to keep the audio from drifting. Hardly visible on the bottom left is a BMD HDLink Pro which converts the SDI signal to HDMI which I use as the video preview screen on a 42" TV. Not visible in the photo I also have a BMD Tri-Sync generator which provides the video reference standard to the VBOB, Tezro and HyperDeck so the video doesn't lose sync and drift from the audio.
Most of my content comes via camera which I connect directly to the HDMI interface on the Hyperdeck and then copy down to the SSD. The HyperDeck then plays back the video stream in 1080P via the SDI interface and straight into the VBOB. As this generation of equipment embeds the audio into the video stream, I use a BMD SDI to SDI mini-converter to strip out a copy of the audio in 2 channel stereo which I then connect to the analogue inputs on the ADA8824.
Here is a photo of the camera with live input to the VBOB and HDLink via the HyperDeck.
f I do need to get older video onto the system, I copy these video files to a PVR (in this case a Panasonic DMP-BD84) via USB drive. As this is a relatively new model, it plays back just about every video codec type. I connect this via HDMI to the HyperDeck and just play the video files. The HyperDeck converts it to the correct standard on the fly so I don't have to worry about file conversion to a type acceptable to the software.
The system is configured around 1080-24P which seems to work fine accept for one glitch I have yet to resolve.
In the second post I will show the applications in use.
Cheers